http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/ en-ca reviews@arcpoetry.ca (Matthew Holmes) web@arcpoetry.ca (Stacey Munro) Copyright 2010 Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:19:33 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=3.2 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss poems poets poetry contemporary poetry Canadian poets Canadian poetry Canadian literature web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) I have a professional interest in poems about children: Brian Bartlett and I will be editing an anthology of Canadian poets writing about their kids, and I indulge in the subject regularly, marvelling and doting on the predilections of daughter and son. I memorialize them, transmogrify them, I make them known unto me so that, when they are adults, they may be known unto themselves. I am trying to make a poem, sure, and never lose sight of that; but there is a secondary purpose, and it is to show them that, once upon a time, they were loved. Zach eschews this route; he writes a love poem about his reluctance to resort to the doting, proud papa role. Just as stoic poems can be paradoxically all the more emotional for their stoicism, this poem goes to the other side of withholding and makes the best kind of gift. ... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2010_03_neilson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2010_03_neilson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2010_03_neilson.php#comments Shane Neilson Zach Wells poetry poets Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:19:33 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) There is an apocalyptic streak in the poetry of A.F. Moritz, one composed of moments when he adopts the raiment of a prophet and comments upon our course in the world. This habit is welcome, as one of the functions of the poet is to interrogate our personal and collective means of being. But in this case, Moritz writes an interlocking poem that asks "What way should we proceed?" and, here, answers in terms of the cyclical. This is a poem of opposites, of counterings, and it begins with an opposite: the table, where people eat and talk and enjoy their lives, and the grave, where people do their grieving. Moritz commingles the two words: the "they" of the poem do not know "whether to grieve or celebrate", suggesting that both practices happen in both locales, table and grave, borrowing a trick of the elegy to mix the potent ingredients and create an effect that is complicated catharsis. The next pairing comes with "noon" and "dusk"; again, Moritz says that the two are sequential, or cyclical. The worth of either option is not rated; like seasons, these opposites turn into one another. Moritz then comments literally upon our century's militarism and industrialism with the vowel-rich "locked stockade of heavy machines" but contrasts this dull and "heavy" line with an airborne blue heron--the poet, perhaps, surveying all?--which finds its own way and goes "farther on." Thus the dead, deadening, grounded aspects of our society are contrasted to a coloured, living, aloft being. At this point, there are two things that are finding their way: the pronoun "they", which the poem suggests is "us", and the heron. But where are they headed? http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2010_01_neilson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2010_01_neilson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2010_01_neilson.php#comments A.F. Moritz Shane Neilson poetry poets Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:51:27 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) We are often told that poetry is "what is lost in translation." But if that is true, why has my greatest pleasure so often been the discovery of poems in translation, poems I can’t understand in the original which nonetheless I experience as "original": that is, as authentic voices unlike any of the other voices I love? "A Precise Woman" by Yehuda Amichai is ostensibly a portrait, in 17 unrhymed lines, of someone whose tightly cinched waist signals the separation of her worldly concerns into the upper and lower spheres. The poem itself imitates this division, its first eight lines describing the imposition of order and the last nine representing its dissolution. The woman's short hair and penchant for tidying drawers emphasize her orderliness but her sensuality is revealed in “cries of passion” that evoke bird-calls. http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_08_glickman.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_08_glickman.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_08_glickman.php#comments Chana Bloch Susan Glickman Yehuda Amichai poetry poets Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:48:39 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) Julie Bruck is that increasingly rare poet who insists upon using the poem, first and foremost, as a vehicle for communication and upon using it well. I love the compassion she feels for the people in her poems – again, a rare quality, and rarer still for being authentic. All of it is grounded by careful attention to how a poem can be made to communicate so that emotion no longer belongs exclusively to the poet but is transpersonal, evoking compassion in the reader, too. http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_06_kosub.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_06_kosub.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_06_kosub.php#comments David Kosub Julie Bruck poetry poets Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:31:07 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) “Winter here” (p. 92) is one of my favourite poems in Alice Burdick’s second book, Flutter, and stands as a kind of key piece for understanding Burdick’s unadorned, yet complex and conflicted, aesthetic. The first lines, uncharacteristically, are wordy and... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_05_christakos.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_05_christakos.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_05_christakos.php#comments Alice Burdick Margaret Christakos poetry poets Sun, 24 May 2009 11:44:01 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) In great poems, chosen words combine in ways which confer unique meaning memorably with resonance and power. The scent they produce infiltrates the mind, like body chemistry. I have good chemistry with this poem. This poem starts with a blow which jolts the reader urgently from peace to panic. It is delivered by a narrator who says ominously 'hush, this lion sleeps tonight.' The wind no longer blows. A sombre, yet tense, insistent tone is set. The reader's attention is dramatically gained; the opening is intriguing. Why the frozen stillness? http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_03_beale.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_03_beale.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_03_beale.php#comments George Murray Nigel Beale poetry poets Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:37:32 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) Choosing to live a life on land instead of on or near the sea is a common theme in several poems from Charles Bruce’s 1952 Governor General’s Award winner The Mulgrave Road. Bruce is never entirely clear about why a... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_01_kosub.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_01_kosub.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2009_01_kosub.php#comments Charles Bruce David Kosub poetry poets Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:02:35 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) Experiencing "for the first time" a sense of dislocation, the speaker of Adam Getty’s "Yellow Grass" promises a new understanding of his place in the world. And he delivers on this promise by envisioning another person and admiring the dynamism of that person’s imagination. Sustaining his initial "wonder" in the surrounding countryside by wondering who might know it intimately, the speaker conjures a person so familiar with the field that he has "named each one of these blades" and identified every "kink" in the grass... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_09_carrara.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_09_carrara.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_09_carrara.php#comments Adam Getty Roseanne Carrara poetry poets Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:22:16 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) Writing poems based on journalistic reportage is perilous at the best of times. The poems risk becoming too freighted with the politics or moral implications of the event itself. Yet no poet, or poetic novelist, with blood in their veins can steer clear of the stranger-than-fiction events that fill the newspapers and airwaves. Regina poet and novelist Dave Margoshes takes on both the unspeakable and the ineffable in this poem about Robert Latimer's decision to kill of his severely disabled daughter Tracy. The poem was written several years after the actual murder took place, but while news of the trial and its controversial verdict were very much in the public eye... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_08_charach.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_08_charach.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_08_charach.php#comments Dave Margoshes Ron Charach poetry poets Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:24:09 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) In one of the most famous pieces of poetic shlock ever penned, Joyce Kilmer muses that he "shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree." "Tree" is not merely the first syllable of treacle, however, and trees--despite poets' best efforts to abet deforestation through publication--are almost always positive emblems when they appear in a poem--even while forests are often dark and terrible zones. A.G. Bailey seems to suggest that if all Kilmer and others can see is arboreal loveliness, then they probably can't see the forest for the trees. "Look well," this poet says, and he means it. Bailey inverts the old chestnut about the innocent beauty of trees by the bold device of comparing the elm's "wittol" (witless; also, a knowing but tolerant cuckold) root to a rat--a neat consonantal rhyme--a trick which has the dual effect of making us question our usual assumptions about trees and of exonerating, or at least complicating, the voracious lusts and appetites of the oft-benighted rodent. http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_07_wells.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_07_wells.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_07_wells.php#comments Alfred G. Bailey Zachariah Wells poetry poets Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:48:56 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) During medical school, I had Nowlan, a New Brunswick poet who developed thyroid cancer at the age of thirty-three, as my major tutor in pain. Before he was diagnosed and eventually underwent three major surgeries, he wrote a poetry of fine lyric, a mainly descriptive poetry that stuck to stanza. But after his cancer, his style exploded: he started to write about himself, about his own impressions and feelings, about his own frailties and how they manifested themselves in others and, most importantly, about his own life-threatening illness. "The Boil" is typical of the kind of poem Nowlan wrote in what I call his middle period; perhaps enamoured of William Carlos Williams' variable foot, with great attention paid to breath. There is great attention paid to typography, meant to simulate the rolling of a boil--"prying it"--between one's fingers, and the gasps as one does so. The words "master" and "servant", though, have pride of place, occupying a line each. Nowlan's poem provides a benign optimism: that the patient can understand her illness for what it is, and thereby steal its mastery. Nowlan's poem describes how one can literally take a problem between one's fingers and exchange servitude for perhaps not mastery (for the boil, though pierced, may form again, and it always levies pain), but at least a measure of control. And good poems are controlled performances... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_06_neilson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_06_neilson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_06_neilson.php#comments Alden Nowlan Shane Neilson poetry poets Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:19:36 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_05_joyce.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_05_joyce.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_05_joyce.php#comments Anne Carson Catherine Joyce poetry poets Thu, 15 May 2008 19:00:44 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) To hold an object with an intensity of gaze that would reveal it, both as itself and yet more than itself, becomes a sacred act and a sacred art--embodying the mysteries-- in the work of Elizabeth Bishop. In her poem, "The Moose", she writes with an impersonal, distancing effect that so precisely articulates the natural world that it moves into dream, opening new dimensions of perception. Bishop begins with a long, mesmerizing evocation of Nova Scotia, the land "of fish and bread and tea,/home of the long tides", with a sinuous line that moves from stanza to stanza without a complete break, rising and falling like the tide itself to capture the feel of travelling through the late afternoon. The music of quiet end rhymes breathes like a sigh, as of a distant, infinitely patient watcher moving with the snail's pace of the bus that "journeys west . . .down hollows, up rises" along the south shore. We are drawn into a trance of seeing the landscape move past the bus windows as "the fog,/shifting, salty, thin,/comes closing in." Everything is washed with it, "the sweet peas cling/to their wet white string/on the whitewashed fences;/bumblebees creep/inside the foxgloves,/and evening commences." http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_01_joyce.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_01_joyce.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2008_01_joyce.php#comments Catherine Joyce Elizabeth Bishop poetry poets Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:15:17 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) MacEwen's gift is her voice. In "A Breakfast for Barbarians", she exposes the deep, insatiable appetite of the soul for its mysteries, cajoling us with confidence, humour and a Rabelaisian delight in the universe that few contemporaries can match. She takes risks, offering us a diverse menu of possibilities that brooks no demur resistance. She will have passion, she will have joy. The poem with its mythic overtones opens with an echo of Mark Anthony's "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears"--addressing the reader in the intimate, knowing and suggestive voice that is MacEwen's hallmark, "my friends, my sweet barbarians". With the authority of an oracle, she asserts the claim that underlies all of her poetry -- "there is that hunger which is not for food". And then the transformation begins as a third eye seizes the centre of appetite, as it seizes the poem itself--"an eye at the navel turns the appetite/round" -- enacting the turning point with the pivot "round" isolated on the middle line of the opening stanza. The first meal of the day becomes a visionary sacrament, "the brain's golden breakfast" with its heraldic companions -- "eaten with beasts/with books on plates" -- an aside resonant of bookplates, claiming an ownership of extravagant proportions. Immediately we know we are in the territory of the soul, the insatiable landscape of MacEwen hunger. http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_12_joyce.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_12_joyce.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_12_joyce.php#comments Catherine Joyce Gwendolyn MacEwen poetry poets Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:02:40 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) In a pre-emptive strike at the outset of the Six Day War in June 1967, Israeli forces attacked the northern front of Egyptian Arab troops mustering in the Sinai region around the city of El-Arish. Casualties and wounded, both military and civilian, numbered in the thousands as Israeli regiments flanked and pushed back the Egyptian Arab soldiers into a retreat that, when coupled with Israel's simultaneous airstrike, would eventually lead to their defeat. Standard infantry issue for the Israeli army throughout the war was the Uzi SMG, a squat, boxy gun made portable by its wraparound breech and telescoping bolt. 7 1/2 lbs with a full clip, 18" long, with an explosive muzzle velocity of 400 m/s, the Uzi can fire 600 rounds of ammunition per minute, or ten bullets per second. Consisting of a few basic stamped-metal parts the Uzi is easy to manufacture, easy to strip and clean in the most inclement field conditions, and can accumulate large amounts of sand and dirt without becoming prone to jamming. The gun is also well-balanced, and with its magazine located in the pistol grip, the ammunition cartridges can be conveniently discharged and reloaded, even in total darkness; something the Israeli military referred to as "hand finds hand" reloading intuition. The Uzi's sole purpose is to kill as many human beings in as efficient a manner as possible. Its design is one of utility; not a weapon that, in the vernacular of a collector or aficionado, could be described as "a real beaut". Or could it? http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_06_seymour.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_06_seymour.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_06_seymour.php#comments David Seymour Robert Bringhurst poetry poets Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:27:07 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) Although the words “sheep” register their meaning on sight, it feels as though one does not initially read this poem. There occurs, simultaneously with the acknowledgement of the words on the page as text, a visual encounter with the poem... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_04_seymour.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_04_seymour.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_04_seymour.php#comments David Seymour Steven McCaffery poetry poets Thu, 19 Apr 2007 14:21:30 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) it is it's all there is it's bright it's brilliant it's it it's expanding, day by day, it's beyond what it was it's difficult, you see, to predict it has no centre, yet it's here it's terrifying it smarts, albeit it is what it is it gathers itself together it's implacable and reserved it's a shapeless eagerness it's moderate to rough it's poor becoming good it generally mimics and resists... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_03_rhodes.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_03_rhodes.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_03_rhodes.php#comments Lisa Robertson Shane Rhodes poetry poets Thu, 01 Mar 2007 12:26:59 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) Some poems resist working. They fight inquisitiveness into any of the secrets of their composition and critical decomposition. Contrary to what it may tell you, Sonnet #1 is not a sonnet. It doesn't follow any sonnet scheme. It could, tangentially, be said to follow a sonnet's argumentative pattern (thesis, antithesis) but this is a stretch. Also, this isn't new. Poets have been calling the strangest things sonnets since the time when it was the dominant poetic form. It isn't new, but I think it helps this poem make meaning. Sonnet #1 is, in essence, about gardening and about writing. In its most cultivated form, gardening is like a sonnet: based on tradition, entrenched in form and rules, rhyming of colour and species, a symbol of civility. Kroetsch says as much with that first line and its colon pointing to the blank white of page stock: my garden is the page and this is my garden/sonnet.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_01_rhodes.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_01_rhodes.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2007_01_rhodes.php#comments Robert Kroetsch Shane Rhodes poetry poets Thu, 04 Jan 2007 17:01:03 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) This is the first poem in Fred Wah's 1982 Governor General award winning book _Waiting for Saskatchewan_. What surprises me about the first line of the poem, and about the title of the book, is the primary importance given to the gerund: waiting. It's the only gerund in the whole poem. The gerund builds permanent expectation never fully achieved in the nasal glottal stop of the higher sinuses. A small grammatical element in a poem that writes grammar and identity together. But _who_ is waiting? Nouns build nouns: "grandparents countries places converged / Europe Asia railroads carpenters nailed grain elevators / Swift Current my grandmother in our house." One of the more impressive buildings in most prairie towns is the Land Registry Office which store deeds and land surveys. In the land registry office in Ottawa, where I live, the architect has worked unhewn granite boulders into the building's smooth concrete surface. I can't think of a better image of land meeting real property law. http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_12_rhodes.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_12_rhodes.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_12_rhodes.php#comments Fred Wah Saskatchewan poetry Shane Rhodes poetry poets Fri, 08 Dec 2006 23:00:02 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) Richard Outram is known to be a difficult poet. His poems are often philosophical and densely allusive, to the point sometimes of near opacity. This not entirely unearned reputation has made him something of a poet's poet, very highly esteemed by a small number of dedicated readers. But, as Carmine Starnino has argued in his recent book [_A Lover's Quarrel_], there is "another Outram" out there, one who does not need in-depth decoding by experts to be appreciated. Starnino singles out "Barbed Wire" as one of the finest products of that other Outram, and justly so. This profoundly moving occasional poem--one of very few overtly autobiographical pieces in Outram's oeuvre--can be apprehended after a single reading by a non-specialist reader. This doesn't mean that the poem yields its secrets easily; after reading this poem several dozen times, I still uncover previously unnoticed nuances in its lines. http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_10_wells.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_10_wells.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_10_wells.php#comments Richard Outram Zachariah Wells poetry poets Mon, 16 Oct 2006 15:48:54 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) Peter Van Toorn is one of Canada’s most inventive and irreverent poets. The sonnet is one of the oldest and most venerable of poetry’s set forms, dating back to fourteenth century Italy. Put the two together and you get a unique sort of magic—and a poem that defies just about anyone’s idea of what should “work” in poetry. At a time when most writers aspiring to compose poetry were scorning the sonnet as a fusty relic of antiquity and British colonialism (Mountain Tea was first published in 1984), Peter Van Toorn was playfully toiling to make the form new. In “Mountain Leaf” Van Toorn, far from finding the form constricting, seems to regard the strictures of a straightforward Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet as too easy. The stereotype of formal verse is that it involves conservative, conformist rule-following. Van Toorn, who is also a jazz musician and understands that genuine improvisation is impossible without strict discipline, will have none of that. Instead, he invents for himself a fresh batch of constraints against which to pit his free-wheeling imagination. http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_09_wells.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_09_wells.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_09_wells.php#comments Peter Van Toorn Zachariah Wells contemporary poetry poetry poets Fri, 01 Sep 2006 17:42:10 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) There are two ways for a poet to achieve immortality: 1) Write at least one, but preferably several, indisputably great poems; or 2) Write at least one, but preferably several, indisputably atrocious poems. The latter might seem easier to do, but to write verse that isn't just slight, mediocre, disposable, dull--to write truly awful poetry--requires a kind of "inverse talent,” as Kathryn and Ross Petras put it in the introduction to their anthology Very Bad Poetry: "It also helps to have a wooden ear for words, a penchant for sinking into a mire of sentimentality, a bullheaded inclination to stuff too many syllables or words into a line or a phrase, and an enviable confidence that allows one to write despite absolutely appalling incompetence." Only three poets in the Petras anthology are allotted more poems than James McIntyre (1827-1906). Thus, although it remains true that Canada has not produced a Yeats, we can say without hyperbole that we have our very own "McGonagall":http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/ ... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_08_wells.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_08_wells.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_08_wells.php#comments James McIntyre Zachariah Wells bad poetry poetry poets very bad poetry Fri, 11 Aug 2006 15:04:07 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) Here is a man of "words, words, words" quite lost in the game of action. Not a hockey player adept at stick handling, he remains shut out. And the rules of the game he does command--language and its grammar--imbue the poem with multiple texts: what the lines say, what is said between them, and what the loins say. Coluccio's hilarious and sexually-loaded wordplay throughout the poem is underscored with pathos, established first by the varied nuances of the title "Misspent Youth." To miss is to fail to meet, take advantage of, or experience. 'Spent' suggests a loss of original force or a purchase at some cost. Immediately an overtone of regret is established. Readers expect some juvenile folly or guilty pleasure and anticipate its price. http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_07_philippsen.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_07_philippsen.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_07_philippsen.php#comments Lynda Philippsen Pino Coluccio contemporary poetry poets Thu, 06 Jul 2006 01:39:54 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) The Christian doctrine of "The Rapture" and Calvin's "Preordained Selection" are subverted in the predatory imagery of this poem. There is nothing resembling ecstatic delight to be found as prey in the clutches of a raptor, and there is more than a little sense of being duped when chosen by God only to find an omnipotent "yellow-eyed glare." Poignancy and courage imbue the lines if the reader knows that the poet has, for a number of years now, been living with and fighting cancer. It increases the dread of "One midnight, you imagine, you'll be swept up, / a mouse off a toadstool, shrieking into the air." ... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_06_philippsen.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_06_philippsen.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_06_philippsen.php#comments Elise Partridge Lynda Philippsen contemporary poetry poets Mon, 12 Jun 2006 14:58:51 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, May 2006) Poetry fascinates me because it creates meaning in so many ways. Borrowing from visual art, its appeal to the eye creates meaning through order and association. That visual order translates into a record of sound, often approaching the structural arrangements of music. And, because the art's medium is language, it has a virtually irrepressible capacity to refer to the world outside itself. Even a poem that privileges one of these three facets of poetic meaning depends on the support of the others to complete it. Bp Nichol's "Doors 1" approaches through the eye. It asks you to make sense of the visual arrangement of the letters in the word "axe" before you can consider whether there is an axe in the room. There are substantial distinctions being made in the way Nichol represents the letters in the word. "A" has depth, volume. Its three-dimensional character is clearest where you can see the top right corner of an inner wall. This tells you, visually, that you could enter this "A" space and move around if you weren't cut off by a solid "X" that boards it up. To get through the "X" and into the "A", you need to traverse the moat created by the dugout "E". That final letter differs because it's insubstantial, an absence rather than a tangible presence.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_05_jennings.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_05_jennings.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_05_jennings.php#comments Chris Jennings bp Nichol contemporary poetry poets Mon, 08 May 2006 16:01:46 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, April 2006) Susan Stenson's "When You Say Infidelity" won first place in the League of Canadian Poets' National Poetry Contest (1999) and is featured in Stenson's first collection of poetry, [_Could Love A Man_]. The poem is fresh in its unusual treatment of content as well as the lush use of language and imagery. Stenson has given both a literal and figurative garden here; we could become lost in the foxglove and forget-me-nots of a night garden. Stenson uses the title of the piece as the first line of the poem, creating an immediacy and cohesiveness to the verse as a whole. Her comparison between infidelity and gardening in the first stanza turns infidelity into something innately organic, leading into the specific naming of everyday garden-variety plants, "foxglove, forget-me-not" with "stems and furry leaves." This specificity allows us to regard the concept of infidelity as something we might touch, something tangible and concrete and undeniably universal. At the end of this stanza, she suggests people "may even whisper its Latin name," invoking an earthly timelessness.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_04_macpherson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_04_macpherson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_04_macpherson.php#comments Andrea MacPherson Susan Stenson contemporary poetry poets Tue, 11 Apr 2006 18:26:33 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) How Poems Work is a web zine for the discussion of poetics in Canada, where the nature and craft of poetry is examined through thoughtful, lively, accessible, analytical, and informative prose. Submit a Feature... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/guidelines/2006_04_about_how_poems_work.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/guidelines/2006_04_about_how_poems_work.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/guidelines/2006_04_about_how_poems_work.php#comments Sat, 01 Apr 2006 13:48:59 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/guidelines/2006_04_submit_a_feature.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/guidelines/2006_04_submit_a_feature.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/guidelines/2006_04_submit_a_feature.php#comments Sat, 01 Apr 2006 13:46:15 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, March 2006) This poem stayed with me for days after I first read it: the overriding image of blue, Bolster's restrained use of language, the sharp image of the greed of artistry. The poem was inspired by a portrait by the same name by Quebec artist, Jean Paul Lemieux. _Les Beaux Jours (1937)_ details an afternoon with his new wife, the painter Madeleine Desrosiers, in Charlevoix. The painting was praised for its harmony of colours in the blue-green palette, as well as the frankness of composition. The poem echoes this aesthetic, capturing not only the tranquility of the work, but also the assumption of intimacy effused within it. Here, Bolster uses understated lyricism--"her scarf,/ flicker of summer maples against river"--to portray both the beauty and the tenuous relationship between husband and wife. http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_03_macpherson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_03_macpherson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_03_macpherson.php#comments Andrea MacPherson Stephanie Bolster contemporary poetry poets Thu, 02 Mar 2006 23:03:46 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, February 2006) This poem is one of an 11-part collection entitled "Elles" that won PRISM International's Earle Birney Prize for Poetry (2000) and was shortlisted for the National Magazine Award for Poetry (2000). Based on the series by the same name, produced in 1896 by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, each poem takes on the voice of the woman featured in the lithograph. They are residents of a brothel, yet each poem reveals the woman separate from her profession; these are women caught in ordinary activities: waking, dressing, bathing.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_02_macpherson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_02_macpherson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2006_02_macpherson.php#comments Andrea MacPherson Sandy Shreve contemporary poetry poets Sat, 11 Feb 2006 12:01:29 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, December 2005) Like the title of a realist painting--say a work by Edward Hopper, who gave apt shorthand titles to his canvases ("Drug Store," for example, or "A Woman in the Sun") that summarized the landscapes or cityscapes, people, or moments he wished to frame--the throwaway evocative power of Sandra Kasturi's title anchors her poem. Its power is reechoed throughout in phrases like "these old men who smoke" and "these men," even in "they"--smaller and smaller skipping stones from which meaning devolves. And yet, like the old men she describes, Kasturi's title is reticent. It betrays little or nothing of her themes.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_12_barton.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_12_barton.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_12_barton.php#comments John Barton Sandra Kasturi contemporary poetry poets Thu, 01 Dec 2005 14:18:42 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, November 2005) As in Outram's "Story," the aural weave of this poem is tight: not only with rhyme and alliteration, but with repetition (heft/heft, evening/evening, thunder/thunder). Like Corkett's poem, this one employs a strong falling rhythm that elbows its way into one's mind. Unlike Outram's and Corkett's poems, however, George Johnston's "Firefly Evening" does not have an obvious narrative line. It is less about story than it is about image; its effects are less cerebral than sensual. http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_11_jernigan.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_11_jernigan.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_11_jernigan.php#comments Amanda Jernigan George Johnston contemporary poetry poets Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:30:05 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, October 2005) If Outram's "Story" draws its stylistic authority from the diction of religion and mathematics, Corkett's "Moses Wisdom" draws its stylistic authority from the diction of the nursery--a no less formidable source. Nursery rhymes are, for many of us, the initiation into figurative language, into rhyme and metre, ordered speech: in short, into poetry. When we recognize the diction of "Moses Wisdom," then, it is with a very old part of our memory; buried that deep, education is transmuted into instinct.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_10_jernigan.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_10_jernigan.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_10_jernigan.php#comments Amanda Jernigan Anne Corkett contemporary poetry poets Thu, 06 Oct 2005 18:17:33 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, September 2005) "[P]oets are like great chessplayers with language," Don Paterson says; "they look less at the next move, or the next ten moves, than at a Gestalt, at a system of relations." A short poem offers us a prime opportunity to study this 'gestalt,' for just as every 'move' takes place within the larger system of the language, it takes place within the smaller system of the poem: each word in a poem is related to each of the others. These relations may be aural, grammatical, semantic, or spatial; they may be consonant or dissonant. They overlay the straightforward progression of the poem, so that the best poems--particularly once learned by heart--take on, for me, a quality of 'thingness,' of substantive existence that transcends their linear construction. Richard Outram's poem "Story" comprises a single sentence, twenty-six words in length. It is divided into two three-line stanzas. (The break, appropriately, comes after the word 'breath.') The first line of each stanza has three strong stresses; the second and third lines have two stresses each, though the metrical distribution of these stresses varies. The rhyme scheme unites the stanzas: aba cbc--or, if we count the slant-rhyme, aba aba.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_09_jernigan.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_09_jernigan.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_09_jernigan.php#comments Amanda Jernigan Richard Outram contemporary poetry poets Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:13:08 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, August 2005) Karen Connelly's "How Clean You Have Become" is a poem of the experience that follows mourning. It illustrates the loss which occurs after grieving has passed, as our memories diffuse, slip away from us. It speaks of what we are left with in the wake of not only the loss of the person but also the loss of grief and the loss of memory. "In the end, the edges of memory/ are licked smooth/ by the rough tongue of time,/ wiped clean./ All you did was beautiful, and good." In the aftermath of mourning, the poem indicates, we in essence rebuild those we have lost. The dead, or more aptly our recollections of the dead, become regulated to a type of purgatory where we, the living, choose to ignore sins and scars. We choose forgetfulness and push recollection to the margins of consciousness.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_08_simeney_macleod.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_08_simeney_macleod.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_08_simeney_macleod.php#comments Heather Simeney MacLeod Karen Solie contemporary poetry poets Fri, 05 Aug 2005 14:53:30 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, July 2005) In the first stanza of Karen Solie's poem "In Praise of Grief", the second person narration does what few second person narration pieces of writing are able to accomplish. It literally refers to you and is not an "I". Solie is successful at this, in the first stanza, because her poem is tightly woven, the images are sparse and exact, for some people certainly do live their whole lives (yes, their whole lives) coddled as eggs. Though the images are sparse, exact, and tightly woven, they are also universal. They are applicable to most readers. Solie offers us comfort with the realization that, of course, like the speaker of the poem, we feel alone at times.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_07_simeney_macleod.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_07_simeney_macleod.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_07_simeney_macleod.php#comments Heather Simeney MacLeod Karen Solie contemporary poetry poets Mon, 11 Jul 2005 19:56:47 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, June 2005) Brad Cran's poem "On Childhood" works on several levels, as most evocative and strong pieces of writing do. It is fundamentally a lamentation of childhood, of loss, imbued with particulars. The poem suggests a strange almost melancholic longing for what most thirty-somethings have in common: the sophisticated childhood gleaned from growing up in the aftermath of free-love. It speaks to the children moving out from the communes filled with doodleart and ponchos, finding Clifford Olsen (for those of us from BC) calling us at dusk from our cul-de-sacs : "We dreamt of bloodied hammers,/ a bad man and a rusty van hunched down/ in the parking lot of Safeway." However--and this not an easy task to undertake, let alone to succeed at in such a small, contained piece of writing--the loss of childhood is made tactile. It becomes real, remembered, the loss irrevocable: "This tree I passed every night without interest/ until the potential of slick rubber tires,/ the sparkling handlebars that I gripped/ as my imagination pedaled off into the night, / where what exists around the corner is left/ out of the lens." Cran has the ability to articulate the universal grief of growing up, and leaving behind the child we once were.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_06_simeney_macleod.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_06_simeney_macleod.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_06_simeney_macleod.php#comments Brad Cran Heather Simeney MacLeod contemporary poetry poets Fri, 03 Jun 2005 14:41:08 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, May 2005) Hip-hop has not, as of yet, extended its influence to the ring of Canadian poetry in the same way it has, to varying degrees, fashion, cinema, and dance, all active participants in the macro social-space of youth culture. Perhaps this is because Canadian poetry--its citizenry and institutions--has consciously endeavored to position itself culturally as mature, if for no other reason than to counter Northrop Frye's claim of ours as "a literature that has not quite done it." The end result has been a continued passive-aggressive articulation of youth culture as anathema to the nation's more "serious" poetic project--whatever that may be.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_05_porco.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_05_porco.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_05_porco.php#comments Alessandro Porco Michael Holmes contemporary poetry poets Sun, 01 May 2005 11:15:39 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, April 2005) Each of David McGimpsey's first three collections of poetry--Lardcake, dogboy, and Hamburger Valley, California--includes installments in what are commonly referred to as his "chubby sonnets." Sixteen-lines in length; dividing equally into four four-line stanzas; picaresque in tone--the poems carefully locate and straddle pathos and bathos, sentimentality and irony. Part character, part caricature, the speaker is, to borrow from "KoKo," "one of the great defectives," a resident of Loserville, described by McGimpsey elsewhere as the "demented but proud and gated community / that will not let the winners in." He is perhaps most-aptly described as a warm-hearted Travis Bickle, or, inversely, a cold-hearted Quixote.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_04_porco.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_04_porco.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_04_porco.php#comments Alessandro Porco David McGimpsey contemporary poetry poets Fri, 01 Apr 2005 11:51:45 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, March 2005) Carolyn Smart's "Frangipani" is as close to a perfect poem as I can imagine. The poem is firmly situated in the imagist tradition, yet distinguished by how it subverts such a tradition--historically, a tradition overly concerned with the beautiful--by inscribing its central image, that of the frangipani in all its various conditions, with a subtle but unsettling touch of the macabre. The macabre recalibrates notions of beauty, while also intimating an underlying humor. The opening stanza's function is two-fold. First, it is expository: the speaker is paying her respects at a wake. The speaker's experience is entirely sensory, as she immediately recognizes the "odour." Second, it establishes a governing poetic style, one in accordance with Pound's oft-cited direct treatment of the thing. Also noteworthy in the first stanza is its detached tone, which suggests the speaker's disassociation from a pained reality; perhaps this is a defense mechanism.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_03_porco.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_03_porco.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_03_porco.php#comments Alessandro Porco Carolyn Smart contemporary poetry poets Tue, 01 Mar 2005 22:18:58 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, February 2005) ... In the poem, "12 O'Clock News", Bishop looks at our ability to feel alienated from the world around us, even when that world is occupied by familiar objects. Each object on the left and each description on the right works in interplay between object and image to create metaphor. The objects from her desk are metaphors for the descriptions that go with them, but the descriptions are also metaphors for the objects, for the wider world, the mass media and the writer herself. Bishop builds from the light (i.e. her gooseneck lamp) and works outward to show all the objects that are illuminated and what they are capable of being. The poem can be read as a commentary on the mass media and how it portrays foreign landscapes. During the early part of the Iraqi war the grey-green surveillance footage depicted an alien world in a way that could only heighten the viewer's sense that Iraq is different and its people "in the dark".... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_02_blomer.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_02_blomer.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_02_blomer.php#comments Elizabeth Bishop Yvonne Blomer poetry poets Tue, 01 Feb 2005 18:57:06 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, January 2005) ... All these senses now come together and charge almost every word of the last stanza. What are the "thrills" referred to in the first line? They are the induced thrills which spiked drinks are intended for at parties; they are the thrill of being born into the world; they are the thrills of contemplating surrender to love and death. The weak knees of the next lines again harken both to the spiked drink of the first stanza and also to the organic physicality of the second and to the spiritual surrender of the third. "The elegant pause/ in which we drop" similarly brings the sense of all three stanzas together, dropping being appropriate to the effects of the drink, to the act of being born and to the surrender to life's big dramas.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_01_sipos.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_01_sipos.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2005_01_sipos.php#comments Donna Kane George Sipos contemporary poetry poets Sat, 01 Jan 2005 15:27:59 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, December 2004) "Dark Pines Under Water" is a celebrated poem, one rich in symbolism and metaphor, often anthologized and justly so. What is this land that's "like a mirror?" Is it Canada? It could be the earth itself--or a symbol for earthly life, the depths of human consciousness. A search on the Internet finds the poem claimed equally on a site about the boreal forest and one celebrating "Dreams, Wonders and Adventures Phantasmagorical." ... MacEwen wrote these lines and published them in her award-winning collection, The Shadow-Maker in 1969, around the same time other Canadian writers (notably Margaret Atwood in Survival) were delving into Canadian consciousness and a national cultural identity. It's possible that "this land" stands as much for Canada as for an individual persona.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_12_myers.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_12_myers.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_12_myers.php#comments Barbara Myers Gwendolyn MacEwen poetry poets Wed, 01 Dec 2004 16:34:27 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, November 2004) Gwendolyn MacEwen was one of the most remarkable Canadian poets of her generation. Never associated with any particular school of writing, she arrived upon the poetry scene in Toronto in the early 1960s, reading her uniquely original work in the coffee houses of the day, such as The Bohemian Embassy. Throughout her writing life of approximately 25 years she published seven collections of poetry, two novels, plays, and stories for children, and won the Governor General's award for poetry twice: first for _The Shadow Maker_ in 1969 and (posthumously) for _Afterworlds_, in 1988. She died in 1987. MacEwen published her collection _The T. E. Lawrence Poems_ in 1982, attributing her first fascination with Lawrence to "sepiatone photographs ... of blurred riders on camels riding to the left into some uncharted desert just beyond the door" pointed out to her in a hotel in Tiberias, Israel, in 1962. Some say she felt herself to be a twin in spirit to Lawrence. "The Mirage" is from this volume. Although all these poems are written in Lawrence's voice, and this one--with its opening line: "This is the desert, as I promised you"--at first appears to be as well, the voice seems to waver as we read on ... like a mirage. The desert may stand for existence, the mirage for--what? Our attempts to assign meaning on behalf of the "marvelous vessels"? The easy conversational tone rests securely on a well-honed framework: five quatrains, each stanza's first and third lines in iambic pentameter, shorter lines woven around them.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_11_myers.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_11_myers.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_11_myers.php#comments Barbara Myers Gwendolyn MacEwen poetry poets Mon, 01 Nov 2004 11:43:30 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, October 2004) This small piece, originally published as a broadsheet by above/ground press, was the last new poem of John Newlove�s to appear in print before his death on December 23, 2003. At the Ottawa memorial reading for John Newlove in January 2004, I read the poem, causing his wife Susan to later comment on the piece, saying, oh, I remember when that happened. In a subsequent email about the poem, Susan writes her account: "[W]e were at Deep Springs College, California, for a summer semester and the students and staff had gone off on one of their adventures in the Mojave Desert, or something like that, leaving the Dean, Barney Childs, wives and kids, John and ranch staff to look after things for a few days. "It was a hot day, and the hired hand who did all the mechanical and such practical work around the ranch and college work was digging a ditch, to lay pipes I think, and he dropped dead of a heart attack--he was an older man, but we were all pretty young then. There were dogs around, and I remember John took charge of it all... It seems to me that he was particularly concerned about the heat, and its effect on the corpse, and the dogs, and whether he could keep them off the corpse; and the length of time it had to stay in situ until the officials had finished their work. Of course, all of this may have nothing to do with the poem." Newlove, who grew up in small towns in Saskatchewan, probably knew all too well about hired men, and manual labour, and the foolishness of working in such heat. There are some things a body doesn't forget.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_10_mclennan.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_10_mclennan.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_10_mclennan.php#comments John Newlove poetry poets rob mclennan Fri, 01 Oct 2004 21:17:10 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, September 2004) "Wordsworth," by Anne Simpson, is from a series called "Gesture Drawings." Technically a gesture drawing is "a quick sketch based on careful observation" --an apt series title for a poem that "sketches" a poet. But "Wordsworth" is also a nod to inspiration. Here, in a lovely reversal, the present day narrator evokes the historical muse: "Give the guy a picnic" and "Let him have" are a retroactive permission. But not a High Romantic permission--the diction here is offhand. Wordsworth is "the guy" not "the great poet", words like "fondle" and "needs" are derisive; the chopped syntax of "Oh how. And how" approaches mockery. So why the irreverence? Simpson's poem (like Spalding's and Zwicky's) is intertextual. Intertextuality speaks not only to the relationship between texts but to ideas of individualism ("originality" "creativity") and inspiration. The philosopher Barthes wrote "A text is ... a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings...blend and clash... The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them". In "Wordsworth" Simpson examines the context of Wordsworth's inspiration--but in a way which is counter and which speaks to other ideas as well.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_09_hunter.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_09_hunter.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_09_hunter.php#comments Aislinn Hunter Anne Simpson contemporary poetry poets Wed, 01 Sep 2004 11:11:11 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, August 2004) What first struck me about "Notorious" was its sense of investigation. Here, Esta Spalding opens up a fissure in a life and dives into it. On the surface this is a poem about change, about death and resurrection, about how we inhabit ourselves. The form reflects this--the swathes of white space between stanzas are fissures in their own right and the unfinished nature of the ideas therein (lines or stanzas that end on words like "entered" "refusal" "stopped" and "find") sends us into the crevasse while also creating a kind of poetic tension--fitting for a poem that references Hitchcock's film _Notorious_.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_08_hunter.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_08_hunter.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_08_hunter.php#comments Aislinn Hunter Esta Spalding contemporary poetry poets Sun, 01 Aug 2004 11:11:11 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, July 2004) Jan Zwicky's beautiful "Brahms' Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115" is constructed as a series of propositions. Each stanza begins with a gentle precept: "That we shall not forget...", "And, though...", "That the mind's light..." and "That a letter...". Taken as whole, the repetition of propositions becomes entreaty, and entreaty underpins that which I think is the thematic and tonal thrust of this poem: a call for optimism and beauty in the face of a wider reality. What I love most about this poem is that it talks about ideals (honour, truth, grace, honesty and love) through an allusion to classical music, a medium (certainly in Brahms' case) where we can easily imagine those qualities residing. And artfully, the qualities above exist in the poem without being listed as a set of nouns, rather they are presented in other contexts: as a verb ("to honour brown"), an adjective ("we will not grow more graceful, / but less") as adverb ("honestly") and as predicate ("beloved").... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_07_hunter.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_07_hunter.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_07_hunter.php#comments Aislinn Hunter Jan Zwicky contemporary poetry poets Thu, 01 Jul 2004 11:11:11 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, May 2004) The late Alden Nowlan was a cancer survivor who wrote a significant body of work devoted to his illness and treatment. "In The Operating Room" is such a poem. It begins strongly, starting off with a man's voice. The opening song is appropriate to the occasion, for the autobiographical "I" of this poem is about to be shunted off by the ritualistic acts of the anesthetist (positioning the patient on the OR table, starting intravenous medication, etc.) into the nether-realm of the general anesthetic. These first few lines are packed further with meaning: "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" is an old slave song that used to be sung by American blacks rowing their masters' goods across Virginia's rivers. The song form--a hymn--is apropos to the poet's funereal circumstance of general anesthesia, a state one remove from death. The occasion of the song is also apt in that the anesthetist will be ferrying the poet from the waking world into unconsciousness. http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_05_neilson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_05_neilson.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_05_neilson.php#comments Alden Nowlan Shane Neilson contemporary poetry poets Sat, 01 May 2004 11:11:00 -0500 web@arcpoetry.ca (Arc) (How Poems Work, April 2004) Phyllis Webb was born in Victoria in 1927. She currently lives on Saltspring Island, on the west coast of Canada. Webb's most recent book is Hanging Fire published by Coach House Press in 1990. She won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry in 1982. "Proposition" is a strong example of the connection between form and content and how that connection strengthens meaning. It explores the complicated proposition of love: what it is to be divided by or united to another person. The narrator's hesitation is heightened through the use of the couplet, short lines and punctuation. Webb makes use of white space to slow the eye, allowing the reader to contemplate each line. As we read the propositions become more complex as does the poem's construction.... http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_04_blomer.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_04_blomer.php http://www.arcpoetry.ca/howpoemswork/features/2004_04_blomer.php#comments Phyllis Webb Yvonne Blomer poetry poets Thu, 01 Apr 2004 11:11:11 -0500